Minecraft mod that runs RISC-V Linux (opens in new tab)

Out of curiosity, is this available in multiplayer, and if so, which physical machine is the "host"? Is it the Minecraft server or is VM execution somehow replicated on the clients (first player that enters an unloaded chunk?)?

I'm eagerly waiting for certificate training with minecraft. Might make certificates like LPIC more accessible and ease the initial barrier to entry.

Even without mods, Minecraft supports programming mechanisms (albeit not robots). redstone blocks can be used like logic gates, to construct traps, play music, open doors or build factories. People have implemented ALUs in redstone.

Minecraft is all about collecting resources and crafting, both can easily automated with 'robots', there are amazing builds and many fun scripts, up the whole oses (window managers?) built with the lua Variante of this mod.

Years ago when I learned about networking at school, I built a WiFi mesh in Minecraft for example.

OpenComputers has players build one or more machines (either "computers" which can't move, or "robots" which can) and then the conceit is those machines seem to run a primitive DOS^W [Edited: I think it's actually Linux?] with floppy disks (flying robots, but booted from floppy disks, hey it's only a game) and they can run Lua programs you write. This mod (OpenComputers II) is a "spiritual successor" to OpenComputers.

It's full blown Lua, albeit running on the imaginary computer inside Minecraft. You can write complex Lua programs, if you want to and know how, and they can cause say, your robot to fly around building things, or realise its battery is low and it should come back for more juice.

So yes.

[The Minecraft mod community has people come and go, and it's not at all uncommon for the idea behind a mod to long outlive the interest of the first person who implements it, so that both projects pass from one author to another and also new projects come along that do more or less the same thing but are being actively maintained while a previous project became moribund. Minecraft is great but it's not the whole world and people move on. So e.g. the vast number of different items in typical modded worlds are unwieldy with Minecraft's built in systems for crafting etc. but soon somebody invented "Too Many Items" a mod which provides an interactive interface to the list of all items. Successors have included: "Not Enough Items" (very famous) and "Just Enough Items" (popular today and so people just say e.g. "Recipe in JEI" and assume you'll know what they meant). OpenComputers II thus isn't as "inevitable" as something like Python 3 was where the existing maintainers are making another one, but it sounds like for your purposes the fact it's RISC-V isn't crucial so I'd stick with plain OpenComputers at least for now ]

OpenComputers is IMHO as a non-parent somewhat suitable for what you're talking about, but it really depends how much she likes Minecraft. The OpenComputers default is to give you a clunky Nano (I think) editor, if you love Minecraft you'll forgive that because hey it's inside Minecraft. But otherwise even at age six it might already be annoying that this text editor is so primitive, yet six year olds aren't going to have the patience to bootstrap themselves a full-blown Emacs, I don't have patience for that and I'm in my forties. So if that's becoming an obstacle, outweighing the fun of being inside Minecraft, a more conventional beginner's programming environment might be appropriate. (If it's just a minor annoyance it is possible to write code in a "real" editor on the big computer and copy-paste it into OpenComputers but I have not done that)

There are a few other mods that have ideas which are core to computing but don't directly teach programming, in particular Integrated Dynamics has some pretty fancy predicate building that feels to me like it would teach some fundamentals about logic and debugging logical systems (is there a Pig stood on this sensor? Is it a full-grown pig? Are there at least two other pigs in this pen? Then let's pick this pig up and send it to the other pen...), but it's not very near the start of ID's progression, so again if Minecraft isn't a big interest already she's unlikely to see the interesting bits before losing interest.

From the documentation:

> Many devices are so-called high level API (HLAPI) devices. This means they are not controlled using regular Linux drives, but via a simple RPC system, employing JSON messages over a serial device.

With OPenComputer on 1.7.10 we call out to a compiler .so library for the Lua interpreter which I assume could do floating poin correctly.

If it can't play doom, it can't run linux.

In the original open computers the limiting factor was the interface between the mod block and the outside world, 6 sides on that block correspond to 6 signals. For a large array as proposed you can network many mod blocks together behind the display, giving you access to many more "sides" to emit signals from.

Whether that's made it into this variant is unclear, I haven't messed around with it. In theory it should be possible though.

Basic instructions:

1. Download the mod and its dependencies from Curseforge (should be 3 JAR files: oc2[1], sedna[2] and markdown_manual[3])

2. Install MultiMC[4], run it and sign into your Minecraft/Microsoft account

3. Click the Add Instance button in the toolbar and choose Vanilla version 1.18.1, give it a name if you like and click OK

4. Click Edit Instance in the sidebar for the new instance

5. Click Install Forge on the right sidebar and select the latest version

6. Select Loader mods in the left sidebar

7. Click Add on the right and select the three JAR files you downloaded in step 1

8. Click Launch down the bottom

Usually it's simpler to install mods with MultiMC if they're already in a modpack, but these mods don't appear to be in one currently.

[1] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/oc2/files

[2] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/sedna/files

[3] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/markdownmanual/...

[4] https://multimc.org/

I have good memories of writing lua scripts for controllers for industrial mods. It feels good to watch the little virtual machine run. Plus if I screw up I don't actually blow anything real up.